Legal operations professionals share their New Year’s Resolutions for 2023
Legal operations professionals have a lot on their minds this year. From the overall economic uncertainty to new data privacy regulations to the effect of artificial intelligence applications like ChatGPT on business, there is a lot for in-house legal teams to manage, and that is just scratching the surface.
To learn more about the trending topics in legal operations for 2023, we asked professionals across the spectrum to share their Legal Ops New Year’s Resolutions with us. The responses covered a wide variety of topics, but there were some common themes: reducing legal spend, utilizing technology to improve efficiency and workflows and creating better processes around legal functions are important goals for many in the industry.
If you’re interested in what legal operations professionals are looking to accomplish in 2023, here are some highlights from the conversation:
Legal Operations & Cost Savings
“One of my top priorities is continuing to develop a best-in-class outside counsel management system by identifying high/medium/low risk matters and high/medium/low cost vendors as we triage new and existing matters. This will allow us to leverage the right people in the right situations while driving efficiencies across the organization.”
– Zachary Ford, Manager, Strategic & Financial Projects, Change Healthcare
“Get a handle on legal spend; enable our company to pay firms using ACH!”
– Harriet Joubert Vaklyes, Senior PM, Legal Operations, CBRE Group
“My main priority is to focus on impactful solutions to help reduce spend, without disrupting work streams. I am also focusing on more well-thought-out implementation plans that include anticipating downstream impacts of solutions, processes and tools.”
– Senior Legal Operations Specialist
Improving Efficiency through Legal Technology
“To connect siloed systems together through API solutions … ultimately allowing to craft a story of Legal’s workload. And continual improvement and enforcement of legal billing guidelines—through summits and workshops with outside counsel.”
– Tom Stephenson, Head of Legal Operations, Credit Karma & Host of the Dear Legal Ops podcast
“Investing in change management and cultural development to ensure tech/processes are impactful and sustainable organization wide.”
– Marie Widmer, Senior Legal Operations Manager, Technology, HubSpot
“Begin to utilize digital options for historically paper-based actions. Also to automate particular actions to help streamline efficiencies.”
– Edward Thomas, Chief Master Sergeant, United States Air Force
“Better in-house tracking of all legal and contracting matters, updates in regional, local and international laws and regulations, and innovation and high tech legal support.”
– Nihal Khaled, Group Paralegal, Mezzan Holding
“This year I hope to create more visibility to legal vendor management and expand the use of our CLM system.”
– Louisa Toy, Legal Operations Manager, One Medical
Improving Legal Department Workflows
“To help GCs understand that legal ops needs to be properly resourced if they want to move the needle, and to help legal ops professionals feel empowered enough to ask for the resources they need.”
– Stephanie Corey, CEO/Founder, UpLevel Ops, LLC
“Continue to establish and build upon legal processes while further developing the legal ops role in my organization.”
– Adrie Christiansen, Legal Operations Lead, Quora
“Make it easier for the business to connect with legal (and vice versa) and receive project support without emailing the team.”
– Chris Manning, Legal Operations, DeepMind
“Assess and streamline existing processes.”
– Alexandra Guajardo, Pricing & Analytics Officer, Shell International
“Operational efficiency, templatizing documents and historical records clean-up.”
– Sheilla Ferreira, Legal Operations Manager, EFI
“To provide more value to our internal clients. This includes expedient legal review and tangible KPIs that will benefit the entire enterprise.”
– Candice Barrigher, Legal Ops Assistant, Wellthy Inc.
“Being a Change Management Champion!”
– Cindy Geib, Lean Law Practitioner, TE Connectivity
“Tracking and reporting accurate data to company founders. Having the contract oversight plan written up and started.”
– Theresa Miller, Legal Operations Specialist, Advisors Excel
Thanks to everyone who shared their Legal Ops Resolutions with us! We know the legal ops community is engaged and working to improve the legal function from every possible angle. Discovering the many key priorities these legal ops practitioners have for 2023 makes that clear. We appreciate all of the Legal Ops responses and will announce the winner of the Oura Ring on social media on Friday, March 3.
We’re looking forward to connecting with the community throughout this year: Take a look at our upcoming events and if you’re attending any please let us know. If you’d like to know how Priori can help your team achieve its resourcing goals or learn more about how legal departments use our technology, register for our webinar on Tuesday, February 28 at 12 p.m. ET.
